


This Tornado Loves You

by dadvans



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 05:06:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6410020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dadvans/pseuds/dadvans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like so many stories before it, this one starts the same:  Boy meets Demon.  Boy falls in love with Demon.  Demon breaks Boy's heart.  Too Pure, Too Good For This World Sister is left to deal with the consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Tornado Loves You

If Mabel were going to go back and rewrite her undergrad psychology thesis on her dumb twin brother’s shitty break up with a force of pure evil (and she would), she would break it down week by week into stages of loss.  If it weren’t a hell she was currently living in, a demon’s reaction to getting his ass dumped would be the research project of her dreams; it would easily get her a few conference panels and an award-winning paper in her field.  Bill shows the typical signs of grief, just jumbled around and executed in the most extreme ways.  For example, week one is definitely still Denial, but Bill expresses it with presents. 

Presents.  Like, in the same way you open your door in the morning to get the newspaper, look down, and then call over your shoulder, “ _hey, looks like our cat left us a present on the front porch this morning!_ ”  That kind of present.  The first morning after the break-up she’s leaving for her internship while Dipper is still asleep on her couch, when she manages to trip over a shoebox left on the doorstep.  She almost doesn’t open it.  There’s a sinking feeling that her life will be exponentially better if she never sees what is inside the box, but she’s also worried one of her neighbors will get curious, so she looks around and seeing no one, brings it inside.

When she opens the box,  “I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY--” is written on the inside of the lid in what is probably blood, and wrapped in tissue underneath is _definitely_ a human heart.  She gags a few times as she closes the lid.

 “Dipper!” She yells, grabbing the shoebox and marching loudly over to his lifeless form on the couch, heels clicking loud enough for her neighbor three floors down to hear her.  “Call your boyfriend!”

 "Not m’boyfriend,” Dipper says sleepily, rolling over so his shoulders are facing her.  He tugs the blanket wrapped around his shoulders over his head. “W’broke up.”

“Well, whoever he is to you, he left a _human heart_ on my _welcome mat_.”  Her welcome mat has a cute cartoon owl on it with a speech bubble coming out of it’s mouth that says _who-o-o’s at my door?_  Now she’s pretty sure she has to burn it.  

She slams the box down on the coffee table and hopes it’s gone by the time she gets home from the office.  (It isn’t.)

Week two is where the grief switches up--Bill is, after all, a slave to the deal, so of course he resorts to Bargaining immediately.  His gifts stop taking on a gruesome, albeit genuine, apologetic tone, and become more desperate.  Exactly a week after tripping over a human heart, Dipper gets another package.  Mabel looks at it from her doorway, unsuspecting in plain brown cardboard and curiously large, while slowly sipping at her morning coffee (which, Dipper complains “is not coffee, it’s ten-percent coffee and ninety-percent peppermint creamer,” but he hasn’t left the couch or changed his sweatpants in eight days, so fuck him, honestly).  

“Dipper!” She shouts, refusing to look away from it for a second. “You have another package!”

“Send it back!” He replies, voice muffled from where he’s shoved his face under three of her throw pillows.  

“There’s no return address!” She says.  There is, but it’s inconspicuous, and she _wants to know what’s inside_ , but she doesn’t want to be the one who gets blasted with a curse intended for Dipper if she opens it, so.  

It takes Dipper about two minutes to shuffle over from her living room.  When he sees the box, his eyebrows go up, clearly overcome with the same curiosity.  “Huh,” he says.  

“Open it!” She says, elbowing him in the side.  He sneers.  

“Fine,” he says eventually, bending over to pick it up.  “Fuck, it’s heavy.”

He carries it into her tiny kitchen, and she shoves over her toaster and coffee pot to make room for it.  Dipper knows his way around her apartment well enough to find a knife to cut it open with.  She feels like she’s a teenager all over again, about to open an ancient tomb, or a pirate’s treasure chest hidden in the depths of Gravity Falls.  What’s inside is actually much more exciting.  

Bill has sent Dipper approximately twenty different dildos, dick designs belonging to a variety of mythical beasts.  There are a few that are at least the size of her forearm, which.  

She shrieks with laughter, falling to the floor before she knows what to do with herself.  Dipper stands above her, grimly reading a note from inside the package.

“What does it say, oh my god, oh my god, bro-bro, hand it over,” she says, waving her hand at him from where she’s laughing on the floor, having difficulty seeing him through the tears in her eyes.  

“It’s not really,” he tries, “it’s not really appropriate, Mabel.”

“Oh my god, _who cares_ , we shared a womb for nine months! Let me see it,” she says.  He reluctantly hands it over, hiding his face with his other hand and sinking down the counter to sit next to her.

Pine Tree--

Let’s take the mindscape into the real world.  I’ll do that thing you like.  Come home.

“ _That thing you like,_ ” Mabel repeats, biting the side of her hand to keep from laughing then and there.  “What is the thing you like?  What does it have to do with a box of what look like dragon dicks?”

Waddles takes this moment to trot into the kitchen and nose at the box hanging precariously off the edge of the counter, knocking it over down onto all three of them.  The dicks rain down all over the kitchen floor, and he squeals away afraid, leaving Mabel and Dipper with the mess.  She takes a purple and green synthetic tentacle that landed between them and pokes him in the shoulder with it.

“You should call him,” she says.  “You should call him, or I will.”

“Have fun,” Dipper says.  He angrily grabs the tentacle out of her hands, and after taking a second to consider it, throws it back in the box laying sideways on the floor.  

Week three is when it gets bad, because week three is Anger.  Dipper has showered maybe once since he moved into Mabel’s living room, and he sure isn’t going to take another one when Bill starts casting plagues upon the apartment.  The shower only sprays blood out the faucet, and locusts start flying in every morning to eat the marshmallows out of Mabel’s favorite cereal.  

“ _Dipper,_ ” she says one morning when he is _still asleep_ on her couch after she’s gone to the Y and back just to take a shower, “I love you, but you have got to talk to Bill.  I can’t do this anymore.  It’s been weeks!”

“It’s over, Mabel,” he says, sitting up only when Mabel tugs the pillow out from underneath his head.  “What’s there to talk about?”

“The fact that you refuse to shower!  Or go to school!  The fact that my couch has a Dipper-shaped hole in it!  You two,” she says, and maybe it’s the thunderstorm of hail and fire that followed her back into the apartment this morning, but she’s starting to get emotional, “you two clearly love each other.  You care, and you gotta believe me when I say he cares too.  You can’t just end things!  You need--Dipper, please, look at me, you need to talk to him!”

He does look at her, but he looks like he’s been gutted from the inside with just the shell of himself remaining when he does; there’s no emotion in his eyes, and it makes her feel gutted too.

“You don’t get it, Mabel,” he says.  “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

He pulls his hoodie up over his head and lays back down.  He doesn’t say anything else.

x

Dipper’s version of events from the night of the break up went like this:

Bill had been at support group, which was normal.  Ever since he started occupying human bodies a few years ago, Bill has been attending weekly support groups for demonic entities trying not to cave to their natural, destructive tendencies.  Dipper has made it a point to explain that this has kind of been a condition of their relationship: Bill can have Dipper, or he can have the world, but he can’t have both.  

So anyway, apparently, one of the guys in Bill’s support group relapsed hard.  Spiked the community center coffee with blood, and the next thing everyone knew, they were sacrificing pigeons on the roof and tracing runes in the air to summon old friends and terrorize nearby pedestrians.  

Bill eventually stumbled home around two a.m. absolutely strung out on pigeon blood and snake oil, and proceeded to set the ceiling on fire.

“Is that why you look all, uh,” Mabel had said, gesturing at him, “singed?”

“No,” Dipper had said, frown a perfect bow.  Bill had climbed into their bed, tracing blood and ash up the sheets on either side of Dipper’s thighs.  

Dipper had said then, _what the fuck, Bill_?  And Bill had shushed him with a sticky, grimy finger.  Dipper had noticed under the flames that he was black up to his elbows, like he had come out of a fire himself and if Dipper were to grab him by the wrist he would crumble into dust.  

 _Pine Tree_ _!_ he had said, kissing Dipper quiet.  His mouth tasted like copper and bile.   _I got an idea, baby, and it involves YOU, ME and the end of THIS PLANET!  How would_ YOU _like to move to the astral plane?_

 _Mmmph_ , Dipper had said, because it was all he could say with Bill kissing into him.  He pushed at Bill’s chest.   _Hey, hey, hey, Bill, what are you--?_

 _I got something I’ve been wanting to give you,_ Bill had said, taking the opportunity of being pushed away to pat himself down.   _Something I’ve been trying to give you for a long time--_

“Was it a ring?” Mabel had blurted out, looking so excited she almost dropped the drink she was holding.  

“No! Will you just listen?  Look,” Dipper had said.  

Bill stopped patting himself down and then snapped his fingers in the air.   _Oh RIGHT!_ He said, before shoving one burnt fist into his chest, the skin there parting like the red sea to reveal a tangled mess of rotten organs and fire and also a long, curved knife with red, glowing symbols engraved in the blade.  Bill pulled it out delicately and his chest zipped shut behind it.

 _Bill_.  Dipper said his name like a warning.  

 _C’mon,_ Bill had replied.  He was crying something black and awful that resembled an oil slick and only smeared across his cheeks when he moved to wipe it away.   _This is--HOO BOY, this is a big moment for me!  Dipper Pines.  Dippin Dot.  Pine Tree.  Notorious D.I.P--_

 _Please stop,_ Dipper quietly protested.

 _Will you_ , Bill said, pressing the blade gently against Dipper’s heart, _will you bid farewell to your flesh and blood?  Your mortal coil?  And destroy this SMALL, insignificant universe with me?_

“Whoa,” Mabel said.  “That’s, uh.”

“Not the worst thing that happened?” Dipper said, before continuing.  

 _No!_ Dipper had said, smacking the knife away with the back of his hand.  Bill, unsurprisingly, looked shocked.  Then he looked angry.  The whites of his eyes faded into a bright, lobster red, pupils glowing gold.  

 _No?_ Bill repeated, almost laughing it out. _What do you mean no?_

 _I mean no,_ Dipper said.

At that point, Bill caught fire.  It was something that Dipper had seen a few times before, when Bill had first started possessing bodies; in trying to stay in line with Dipper’s ethical values, he’d taken to only occupying the recently deceased, but it took a few tries to realize there was a specific time frame after death he could occupy the body before the body would continue to decompose regardless of being possessed, which resulted in his first three or four forms spontaneously combusting.  His current form was still his fifth, though, and Dipper was sad to see it go.  

What made him even sadder was the form that emerged from his ashes.  

“A fully formed pyramid Bill?” Mabel repeated when he told her.  “But isn’t that, you know? His usual form?”

“It _was_ ,” Dipper said.  “It hasn’t been for--I don’t know.  Look, when we met again in that minotaur maze, Bill wasn’t uh.  He wasn’t anything.  He was an eye at that point, and a glitchy one.”

Mabel’s never asked about the minotaur maze, or any of the other circumstances that had brought Bill back into their life.  At the time it had happened she was just excited to see her brother alive and happy, and their former foe a little less bloodthirsty.  

“When we trapped him in Grunkle Stan’s mind, we stripped Bill of his power until he was near nothing.  He probably would still _be_ nothing if we hadn’t helped Grunkle Stan recover his memories, but.  Anyway.  He was virtually powerless, and--I don’t know what he’s been doing to regain it so quickly.  He told me it would be centuries before he would have that kind of power again.  He told me I wouldn’t have to worry about it.  I think--I think he’s been using me, Mabel.  Draining me, maybe. I don’t know how, but there’s no other explanation.”

“Dipper,” she said.  She didn’t want to believe it.  A few weeks ago, Bill had been over while Dipper was in class.  He did that sometimes, claimed he was bored and would show up unannounced at her apartment to take advantage of her good company and even better cable package.  They had watched a marathon of Say Yes To The Dress for two and a half hours, before Bill had turned to her.

 _The EFFORT that some humans will go to lie to themselves and SELF-AGGRANDIZE over their PRIMAL, chemical desire to FUCK_ , he’d remarked curiously, right after making a painfully mean comment about the bride never being able to fit into her bodice.  

 _Ha ha_ , Mabel had replied, rolling her eyes, hoping he didn’t look at her bookshelf, where she had approximately three scrapbooks dedicated to her own dream wedding.   _It’s silly, you know, I think it’s really overblown._

 _Don’t get me wrong, I love a GOOD PARTY_ , Bill continued, waving a hand at the screen, where the credits were rolling over a happy couple cutting into a ten-tiered cake.   _Especially ones that celebrate ME and how GOOD I LOOK. You know, marriage might not be a bad idea for all the wrong reasons! I’d have a chance to show off your brother as MINE to all of his loved ones, and as long as I’m putting in the effort to pump blood through these TEMPORAL VEINS, I should be taking every opportunity to wear a nice suit. Hey, Ma-bell Prize, you think Pine Tree would say yes to this ancient heart of darkness if I got down on one knee?_

Mabel thought about it seriously.  They’d been together for almost five years, lived together, did all the boring couple shit like pick out thousand-count bedsheets with their tax returns.  Dipper had confided in Mabel years ago at Soos and Melody’s wedding that he thought he was falling in love with Bill, so she’s sure as she knows him that he’s somewhere deep and awful, head over heels for Bill now.  

 _Yeah_ , she had answered honestly.   _But not for the wrong reasons._

 _PUH-LEASE, the only people who think there are RIGHT REASONS to get married are the people who are using a tired, bourgeoisie ceremony to make up for the passion they lost six months in. And sure, sure, rituals like weddings have POWER, but not as much power as the REAL DEAL. LOVE, in it’s rawest form, is a primeval, unconditional desire to protect and make your own existence intangible with someone else’s as a means to REPRODUCE and ENDURE. In that form it’s more powerful than any FROU FROU ceremony that requires GLOBE STRING LIGHTS and a RHINESTONE GOWN, ya feel me? I have COMPOUNDED the whole of my existence into this WEAK, MORTAL BODY for the right reason,_ he had said, gesturing to a framed picture of Dipper and Mabel hanging on Mabel’s wall. _Let me shove cake in his face and kiss him in front of hundreds for the wrong ones._

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mabel said to Dipper the night of the break up, remembering.  

“He never loved me,” Dipper said unhearing, leaning his head on her shoulder.  “He’s not a person, so it was stupid of me to think he had--had people feelings.  God.  I’m so scared, Mabel.”  

“Dipper,” she said again.  She wanted to tell him every thing that Bill had said that day, about love, about marriage, about a silver band with a small yellow diamond he saw in an antique store the other day after she told him that a collaring ceremony was out of the question.  But she took in Dipper’s dejected slouch and fire-kissed hair and sulfur smell, and she couldn’t say anything else at all.

x

It’s not that she hates Dipper being around all the time, it’s just that he’s so sad.  When he first showed up at her doorstep she was upset, because break ups were upsetting, and she had sort of thought that Bill and Dipper were this Forever thing that transcended most relationship bullshit, that they were going to get married, and she was going to live vicariously through them as she continued to be a dangerous, exciting single woman through her mid-fifties, when she finally would settle down and marry a hot piece of ass half her age.  But she would be lying if she said she wasn’t a little excited at the idea of her and Dipper spending more time together, maybe even living together, like the best parts of growing up all over again.  

Week four, and she thinks all three of them have hit Depression.  Dipper’s been there the whole time, lying around like a slug in sweatpants, but Mabel’s just sad looking at him now, and she’s sad because a part of her oddly misses Bill, and misses the two of them together, and she’s sad because the plagues stopped, except there’s a constant torrential downpour just surrounding their building, so she’s pretty sure Bill’s sad too.  

“Don’t you think like, if Bill was seriously as powerful as you said he was, and was serious about taking over the world and destroying the universe, you know, he would have done it by now?” She asks, sitting on the arm of the couch next to Dipper, who is two days deep in a Beat Bobby Flay binge.  

“That’s what he wants us to think,” Dipper says around the string of his hoodie that he’s been sucking on for the past forty-five minutes, which, gross.  She rolls her eyes.  

“We’re getting drunk,” she announces.  She can’t take it anymore.  She can’t take his unwavering downer attitude, his stubborn refusal to see outside of himself, or his inability to get off the couch and take a shower.  Everything she has tried to do to get him to talk to Bill, or even address the situation has failed, so she’s going with the last option available to her: engage Box of Wine Pines, the notorious collegiate lush and emotional blabbermouth her brother so quickly becomes with an ounce of alcohol in his system.

He fights it, of course, because she isn’t necessarily the most subtle person in the world.  But he also has never been one to turn down free booze, which is why they end up with Waddles in both of their laps on the living room floor two hours later.

“You gotta tell me,” she says, slapping his thigh with one of the dildos they’ve failed to put back in the box.  She’s learned, after much investigation, that this is what a unicorn dick should look like, and hasn’t pushed much further than that.  “Did you guys seriously use shit like this?”

“ _Mabel,_ ” he whines, instead of giving her an honest answer, which.

“I’m taking that as a _yes_ ,” she says, waving the unicorn dong in the air enthusiastically.  

“No,” he says, and then stops to think about what he wants to say next.  She knows it’s gonna be juicy.  “Look, Bill and I-- we.  It was an interesting relationship?”

“Oh my god, you can’t even talk about the freaky stuff that you guys were into,” she says, taking a big gulp of wine from the glass she’s holding in her dildo-less hand.

“It wasn’t!” He protests, holding his own wine glass up suddenly, sloshing some of its contents on his shoulder.  “Okay, maybe it was.  Just a little.”

“ _Tell me,_ ” she prods, tugging at his shoulder.  

“No,” he says, sucking at the fabric of his shirt now covered in zinfandel.  

“Yes!” She replies.  “Look, you knew all about my firsts! My first kiss, my first Real Boyfriend, my first everything else.”

“I didn’t ask though!” Dipper says. “You just told me! You _forced me_ to listen to you, even!”

“Come on,” Mabel sing-songs.  “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

“Oh my God, fine!” Dipper says, rolling his head back onto the couch cushions.  “The sex was great.  Like, really, really great.  Like it pains me to think about how great the sex was.”

“Oo-OO-ooh,” Mabel says.  She scratches Waddle’s tummy absently, and takes another drink.  “Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?”

“Mabel,” Dipper says like a warning.

“Tell me more, tell me more, _did he put up a fight?_ ” Mabel continues to sing, boxing her hands out. Wine spills out of the glass and down her wrists.

“Jesus, fine, I’ll tell you!” Dipper says, bringing a hand up to cover his eyes.  “Uh.  We used to do a lot uh, in our dreams?  In the mindscape.  But there he could take any form, and.  He could multiply, it was just--really intense, you know?  Lots of dicks.  Lots of weird, not-human dicks.”

“Oh my God,” Mabel says.  She’s not sure if that sounds like a dream or a nightmare.  

“Even when we were awake, he would uh,” Dipper says, and he’s so drunk right now, clearly, because Mabel wouldn’t ever be able to get this kind of shit out of him.  “He’d do this thing where he’d uh, make me sit on a toy while I blew him.  It was kind of the closest we could come to the mindscape, but you feel more in the real world, and it was always so intense.  He’d just have me by the hair and fuck my mouth super slow, telling me he was going to pump me so full of tentacles he would tear me apart.”

Mabel spits out the wine she’s drinking, making Dipper an even bigger mess.  He looks like a crime scene at this point.  “Wow, bro-bro, you are a _freak_.”

“Yeah,” Dipper agrees.  He sounds sad about it.  He sounds like he’s sad because he misses it, and he misses Bill.  

“And I’m not saying you won’t find that other special guy or girl that will have weird tentacle sex with you,” Mabel says a little hastily, “but maybe you should really give him a call.”

“I know,” Dipper says.  He stares at the tentacle dildo between them on the floor, and he does it so longingly that Mabel would laugh, except it’s sad as fuck.  “I know.

x

Mabel is surprised when she gets home from her internship the next day only slightly hungover to not see Dipper on the couch.  Or anywhere in the apartment.  She lets out a sigh of relief she didn’t know she was holding in.  She hopes this means he’s gone to talk to Bill.  She hopes he took a shower first.  

She’s halfway into slipping out of her stiff work clothes and into some pajama pants when there’s a knock at the door.  She hasn’t had anyone over since Dipper’s been staying with her (which, mopey brother on the couch has been a major cramp on her sex life), and she hasn’t been expecting anyone, so she waits for a second to see if they knock again.  

They do.  She goes out to her front door in PJ pants and a silk blouse and looks through the peephole to see who it is.  

She doesn’t recognize them, but one thing is for sure: they are painfully, painfully attractive, and probably a male model.  She can just see his face for the most part, sharp and angular, with a faded undercut, eyes hidden behind a pair of mirror-lensed aviators.  She doesn’t even care if he’s a serial killer, she opens the door.

“Hel-lo,” she says, trying to lean in the doorway sultry and inviting, even though her pants have cupcake patterns on them.  

“Mabel!” he says, “it’s me!”

“Nice to meet you, _Me_ ,” she says, eyebrows waggling, but then she takes in his appearance.  He’s dressed oddly formal; gold cardigan with a black button up done all the way to his adam’s apple and skinny black jeans.  Bill always stuck to a certain aesthetic.  “Oh.  Bill.”

He smiles, and it is disarming how sweet it looks, until he takes off his sunglasses and tucks them into his cardigan pocket, revealing a pair of cat-like yellow eyes with thin slit pupils. “The-e-re you go!” he says with his typical minor key melody that would be kind of unsettling if it weren’t coming out of the sexiest mouth alive.  

“Dipper’s not here,” she says, crossing her arms and leaning a little less suggestively against the door.  “Literally the first time he’s left the apartment in the month since he’s been here.  Sorry.”

His mouth zips together in a thin, white line.

“Yeah,” she says, “so.”

“This is NO BUENO, starshine!” he says, pulling out a phone-- it’s not his, it belongs to someone else, maybe whoever he took the body from.  “I keep getting these texts on this phone from a number I don’t know saying they have my boyfriend.  And I FIGURED that it was whoever this guy--” he gestures to himself, “--was dating, but I just had to make sure.”

“Are you saying Dipper was kidnapped?” She can feel her hands shaking suddenly.

He bites his lip.  “I MEAN! I texted back ‘pics or it didn’t happen,’ but I haven’t got a response yet.”

His phone goes off, as if summoned, which knowing Bill it could have been.  He casually brings it back up to his line of vision, swipes to open the message, and stares blankly at it for a moment.  Then the phone bursts into a blue flame in his hand and black plastic starts to melt down his wrist, to which he hardly reacts.

“Wow!  That must have been, um,” Mabel says, trying not to feel too worried. “That must have been some message.”

“YEAH, SOME MESSAGE alright! ” Bill repeats, sounding a cheerful kind of angry that Mabel knows is dangerous.  He pushes past her into the apartment. “O-KAY, lil mama! I gotta sacrifice Waddles to the greater good.”

“What!” Mabel says, letting the door swing closed behind her as she chases after him.  

“Some dumb walking COLOSTOMY SACK has a death wish!” Bill says, getting on his hands and knees in the living room to look around for Waddles. “They took Pine Tree.”

“So, you need to kill Waddles, my soul mate and life companion, why?” She asks, hands on her hips.  She thinks Waddles is asleep in her bedroom on the papasan, but she’s not going to tell Bill that.

“Because!” Bill says.  “This PLEBIAN technology-- broke.  I got, uh.”

“Emotional?” Mabel supplies.  Bill shudders.  

“It’s this new skin suit I’m wearing! I’m not used to his chemicals yet, it’s.  He’s a messy FUCKTRUCK of hormones,” Bill tries, waving his hand in the air dismissively.  He’s still got his head on the ground like he’s listening for hoof beats. “Anyway, I don’t know WHO or WHERE THESE WORMS are getting themselves off, but I need to do a little blood magic so I can DIG them out and watch them slowly shrivel up until they look like a burnt basket of curly fries.  Because I want them to be on fire!”  He turns back up to her and his smile has lost all of it’s sweetness, stretched across his face, teeth too white and eyes too wide. “That settles it! I’m setting them on fire!”

“Can’t you, ugh, I don’t know!  Get blood for a blood sacrifice from literally anywhere else?” Mabel asks.

“What, like your neighbors?” Bill asks, rolling around to lean back on his elbows. He winks and snaps his fingers into a little gun at her, which makes her blush a little. “I LIKE YOUR STYLE, KID.”

“No!” She turns her head to face the ceiling, hoping the woman upstairs can’t hear them, because she’s pretty sure who always reports her noise complaints, and that’s the last thing she wants to deal with.  “Like! Mice from the pet store!”

“Of COURSE,” he says, like it was so obvious all along.  He hops up and presses a kiss to her forehead. “Bless your PURE, SIMPLE HEART, Shooting Star.  Sometimes the MULTIPLE MILLENIA of knowledge I have keeps me from seeing the little picture.  HEY!  You don’t suppose they have any LAMB, do ya?  Mice are well and good, but there’s something about an OLD-FASHIONED, BIBLICAL blood sacrifice that really REVS MY ENGINE”

The trip to PetCo is, as Mabel expects, horrifying.  The guy conversationally asks if Bill owns a snake, and when Bill doesn’t understand the question, he explains, “you know, because of the _mice_ ,” and Bill’s eyes light up like a cat’s at night.  They barely make it out of the store without being escorted out, because Bill won’t stop asking if the mice have fleas and whether or not humanity has discovered the cure for the bubonic plague yet, because he might just be back tomorrow, depending on your answer!

He whispers things in an ancient language to the mice through their cardboard box that Mabel doesn’t understand the entire drive back, and she’s not sure she wants to know.  They go to Bill and Dipper’s apartment instead of her own, because she doesn’t want to clean up the mess and be haunted by whatever residual bad vibes that typically lurk for a few days after inciting black magic.  

“I’m going to hang out in the living room,” she says, because she doesn’t need to see a dozen mice get massacred in the kitchen sink, but also because she loves Bill and Dipper’s living room.  For someone who claims to be tired of the confines of physical reality and the limitations of matter versus light, Bill is an incredible interior decorator, and the place is comfortable and homey in a way her own budget can’t afford.

“Sorry, Shooting Star, all HANDS ON DECK for this ritual slaughter!” He tells her gleefully, pulling her away from the something-thousand Bauhaus sofa that’s calling her name.  “While I take care of RALPH, BERNARD AND JERRY HERE, I need you to grind up these old BIRD BONES with some of your brother’s locks of hair!”

“Ugh, did you have to name them?” Mabel asks, glancing worriedly at the cardboard box of mice he’s placed in the sink, while he pulls a ziplock of Dipper’s hair out of his back pocket and pushes it to her across the counter with a William & Sonoma mortal and pestle.  “And did you have that the whole time?  Does Dipper know you carry around his hair?”

“LOOK,” Bill says, and Mabel doesn’t, because he’s turned back to the mice, and the less she sees the less traumatized she’ll be.  She faces the opposite wall and dumps the ziplock into the mortar with the bird bones that Bill’s been keeping in a ceramic sugar jar.  “I may protect him from things like the SECRETS of the UNIVERSE and the PREDETERMINED FATE OF HUMANITY, but give us some fucking CREDIT, Mabel Syrup!  Your brother and I, to the extent that he can understand it, are in a MONOGAMOUS, LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP. Of COURSE he knows that I keep a ziplock of his hair on me at all times!  You think I took this from him in his SLEEP?  I’ve had it since the MINOTAUR MAZE, because he GAVE IT to me!  It’s the most POWERFUL THING my human body can POSSESS besides ITSELF.”

Mabel can’t let herself unfocus from her own task, because it’s the only thing that distracts her from the noises coming from behind her, but when the noises fade, she clears her throat.  She can’t stop thinking of Dipper the night of the break-up, saying _he told me it would be centuries before he would have that kind of power again._ “You’re telling that you get power just from a few strands of Dipper’s hair?”

Bill shoulders her to the side, taking the pestle from her with bloody hands.  “LISTEN, as much as I enjoy TEARING APART ANY AND ALL NOTIONS that the FEELINGS and EMOTIONS you humans qualify as MEANINGFUL have any real weight outside of your frankly LAUGHABLE understanding of the universe,” he says, punctuating every few words by grinding the bones and hair together, “I MAY have a tendency to understate the power RAW HUMAN EMOTION is OCCASIONALLY capable of.  And your brother, WELL!  He’s an awfully passionate guy.”

“He loves you,” Mabel says, barely above a whisper.  

“SURE!” Bill says, crushing another bone under the pestle.  

“It’s his love that’s made you so strong,” she says, “stronger than you knew you’d be capable of growing by yourself.”

He stops grinding.  The bones are more dust at this point anyway.  He turns to face her, and for once she realizes that maybe she shouldn’t always say everything she’s thinking out loud, even if he might have been able to hear her anyway.  She isn’t sure.  Suddenly, she feels very small and scared. 

“BRAINS really run in your family, don’t they, Shooting Star,” he says, a little too evenly.  “You think you got me all figured out!”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t look so worried! Love doesn’t WORK if there’s only one conduit!” he says, rolling his eyes when she takes a step back. “This power doesn’t manifest for the sake of POWER.  It has to be--look, you’re a SMART GIRL, Shooting Star, but I don’t have time to explain how some very OLD and frankly, INCREDIBLY LAME power of love BULLSHIT has it’s roots in some universal constant that some may mistake as TRUTH.”

“‘Power of love?’” She echoes, before a very childish, giddy feeling blooms in her chest and threatens to overwhelm her.  “I _knew it!_  You’re a _sap_ who’s in love with my _brother_!”

“CONGRATULATIONS, Grand Prize Winner, Mabel Pines!  You win that BOX of decapitated mouse carcasses! Which, if you could pass them to me!”  He says waving one bloodied hand in their direction.  “I have an ALL-SEEING EYE I need to manifest so I can, you know, SAVE HIS LIFE.”

She bites her bottom lip, blushing a little at his frankness, and tries to grab the box without looking inside.  He hastily takes it from her and starts scooping from the box into the pestle, taking turns crushing and blending everything together while she looks literally anywhere else in the kitchen and whistles.  

He interrupts her in the middle of a pretty incredible whistle rendition of Britney Spears’ Til The World Ends.  “OH and HEY! BEFORE WE GET THIS SHOW ON THE ROAD, CONSIDER THIS: As your brother is my only source of power, he is also my only WEAKNESS!  So maybe don’t go WRITING SONNETS about us or anything.  Maybe keep it on the DOWN LOW, by which I mean the DOWN, DOWN, W-A-A-A-Y DOWN LOW!  It’s not something me and him really SAY WITH WORDS, ya FEELING ME, M-Unit?”

“Yes!” She says.  She’s wants to sound serious; she gets that he’s saying people will want to hurt Dipper to get to him--in essence, they’re already doing just that. But there’s a human intensity to his voice that makes her heart ache with sympathy and fondness for him all at once, and she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling too much.

x

They trace Dipper through the All-Seeing Eye to a nondescript office building downtown that is apparently a front for some big league drug pushers.  Bill gets a nosebleed at the apartment halfway through the seeing ceremony, and pouts like a small child the entire drive over in the passenger seat, chin tilted toward the roof with tissue stuck up his nose.   

“Are you gonna be okay?” She asks, laughing a little, even though she’s genuinely worried.  

“OH, I’m DIBINE, just ” Bill says angrily to the ceiling, “DIS BAG OF MEAT I’M INHABIDING CAN’T HANDLE A LIDDLE OMNISCIENCE.”

She’s afraid he’ll spontaneous combust before they get the chance to save Dipper, something she also witnessed a handful of times in the earlier years, but the nosebleed stops by the time they find a two-hour parking space less than a block away from the office building.  She breathes a sigh of relief; she would never be able to forgive herself if her brother never was given the opportunity to tap Bill’s new vessel at least once.

“So, what’s the plan?” She asks, turning to him.  He’s already unbuckling his seatbelt and getting out of the car.

“WHO NEEDS A PLAN WHEN YOU’VE GOT _ME_!” He replies, and it takes a few fumbled, hasty moves to get out of the car and keep up with him as he rushes into the building.  They sail past an empty receptionist desk in the lobby to a row of elevators, which open before Bill or Mabel even press the button to go up.  They step inside and the doors shut behind them, and Mabel tries not to act startled when the elevator starts moving on its own without direction.  She looks up at Bill, who has covered his eyes again with the mirrored aviators, but now they fail to hide the intense glow radiating from the sides of the lenses; he’s furious.  She wonders if she shouldn’t have waited in the car.  

The elevator doors open to a large office, where four men instantly turn around and point their loaded weapons at Bill and Mabel.  Dipper sits, stirring from unconsciousness and duct taped to a cheap computer chair, near the back of the room with three other men who are talking in hushed voices.  

“Yusef!” One of the men near the back says.  “We’ve been wondering where you’ve been.  Thought we might have miscalculated this boy’s worth to you and were thinking about, well-- _letting him go_ , so to speak.”

“YUSEF, huh!” Bill says, ignoring the rest and turning to Mabel, as if he’s sharing a joke.  “You woulda thought I could have checked this sucker’s wallet before possessing him, gotten to know his name!  Pretty dapper guy, this Yusef!”

The crowded room looks on confused.  Dipper groans, one eye blinking open.  

“YOU SEE, gentlemen, you’ve got the wrong guy!  Yusef checked out from this mortal hellscape a few weeks ago when ONE of you DELIGHTFUL SO-AND-SO’s punched his ticket.”  Bill thumbs open the top button of his collar and the second to reveal a fresh, shiny scar that lines the circumference of his neck.  “Which worked WONDERS for me, because I’m like a hermit crab, see?  And I needed a new home!  And Yusef, well!  Despite the GAPING WOUND, looked like a swanky piece of real estate!  But I bet you were scratching your BALD, WELL-OILED, LIVER-SPOTTED HEADS over how he musta made it, huh!  WELL. Now you can REST EASY knowing he didn’t!”

One of the guards moves to shoot, but Bill is faster.  He shakes a finger, smiling bright and wide, as the man finds himself in suspended animation.  

“NUH-UH-UH, TRIGGER,” he tssks.  “Guess they didn’t hire YOU for your SMARTS!  Must be hard to hear your own thoughts with that PEANUT BRAIN rattling around behind those WIDE EYES of yours though, ISN’T IT.”

He snaps his fingers and all four of the men get thrown to the far walls of the room, guns falling from their grip.  The three men near Dipper move to grab guns from their own holsters, but find themselves frozen in motion as well, resembling angry, old mannequins.  

“Bill,” Mabel says, nodding up at him.  His nose has started bleeding again.  He sniffs, wipes at it, shrugs with a smile like a boxer in a ring.  

“If you’re worried about a LITTLE BLOOD, Mabel,” he says, “I would say help poor Pine Tree out of that FAUX LEATHER WALMART BRAND DISCOUNT BIN REJECT of a chair, and get him outta here.  Because I’m thinking it’s ABOUT TIME we redecorated this room, starting with a FRESH COAT of PAINT.”  

The men remain frozen against the walls like they’re held at their limbs by invisible darts as Mabel runs forward to Dipper and starts to tear at the tape around his arms and waist.  He looks up at her with huge pupils, clearly drugged. “Mbbbll?” He attempts, swaying toward her as she gets him free to his ankles.  

“Dipper,” she says, voice wobbling with his name.  She’s been so removed from the reality of Dipper being in this position without actually seeing him, and maybe she’s still tough from their experiences growing up, but having him in her arms makes her so angry and sad and guilty all at once for not doing more to protect him.  She finally gets his legs undone and slips his arm over her shoulder.  “Can you walk?  We’re gonna get you outta here.”

Dipper’s able to take wobbly steps with her help, and they make it to the other side of the room.  Bill’s face is unreadable, eyes still hidden and mouth a playful smile she’s only beginning to recognize on his new face.  He’s got a thick stream of blood drooling past his mouth and down his chin now, but it doesn’t seem to phase him.  

“Keep the CAR RUNNING, would you, sister?”  He says, unmoving.  “I’ll be down before you can say EVISCERATE.”

If Dipper knows where he is, or that Bill is five feet away from them, he doesn’t seem to be phased.  The elevator door dings open again on its own, and Dipper stumbles forward, pulling Mabel along with him.  As soon as they’re safely inside the doors close to the sound of Bill saying, _now WHICH ONE of you tough guys thinks he knows how long the human body can survive in a microwave oven!_

In the elevator she pulls Dipper against her in a tight hug, which he droops into.  He doesn’t speak at all and she reaches her arms up and around past his armpits so she can stroke his hair.  He never did hit a growth spurt like he always thought he would, so he’s always stayed a half inch shorter, but she’s not sure if that’s a comfort more for him or her right now.  She’s just happy to be able to touch him, to see him relatively unhurt.  

By the time she’s got him back out to the car, she wonders if it hasn’t all been a dream-- everything that has happened in the past few hours has done so with such smooth, rapid succession, and that’s a sinister thought, knowing Bill’s involvement.  She starts doing some of the things Grunkle Ford taught her to protect herself in dreams when she was younger, like making sure she can read street signs and smell things, while Dipper drools into his collar in the passenger seat; she turns on the radio just to make sure she can understand the songs.  

Everything checks out.  She breathes a little easier.

And then Bill comes through the rotating doors of the office building covered in what is definitely several bodies worth of blood and entrails, some chunks of bone visible in his hair and what looks like part of a human small intestine tract stuck to the bottom of his shoe.  He makes the circular motion for _roll down your window._ Somewhat hesitant, she does.  

“HEY!  I have GARBAGE BAGS if you want to open the door!” He says, waving a roll of black, heavy-duty garbage bags from under one arm.  She leans back behind Dipper’s seat to open the curbside door for Bill.  He slips his shoes off and leaves them on the pavement, and takes his time making a blanket of plastic to cover her back seat and floor.

“You aren’t worried about uh,” she says, eyeing him in the rearview mirror as he closes the door with his relatively blood-free toes, “leaving evidence behind you?”

“Shooting Star, why don’t YOU worry about getting us the hell out of here, and I’LL worry about my fingerprints ever recovering from when I BURNED THEM OFF the second I squeezed myself into this MEAT SACK,” Bill says, giving the seat belt a second of consideration, before sneering at what wearing it would suggest. “And GOOD LUCK to whatever scientist can decipher THAT DNA soup!  I’d say I don’t envy him, but who doesn’t like getting ELBOWS DEEP in human viscera! Viscera of ANY KIND, really, I’m not picky!”

Mabel pulls away from the curb, leaving Bill’s sanguine-soaked shoes behind, and drives as quickly back to Dipper and Bill’s apartment building as she can.  The ride is quiet, save for the radio she’s still left on, but it might as well be white noise considering how much she continues to listen to it.  When they finally pull into the underground garage and park, she feels like a chauffeur running around to the other side of the car to open both of their doors.

Bill actually tries to help her carry Dipper’s dead weight to the elevator, but she winces away from him, even if he is starting to crust over brown in most places.  “Maybe work on touching as little as possible until after you’ve had a shower,” she suggests, juggling her keys for the spare she has to their apartment.  

They shuffle upstairs slow and unevenly, and she gets Dipper settled in the king bed he hasn’t slept in for almost a month before realizing how exhausted she is herself.  Down the hallway, she can hear the sound of the shower coming on in the bathroom, and thinks, _well_ , _it could be awhile_ , and crawls under the down duvet to curl up next to her brother and close her eyes for just a few minutes.  

x

Mabel wakes up to shouting.  

It feels like she’s been asleep for a hundred years, and on days like today she wouldn’t question it if it were true. She almost doesn’t remember where she is or how she got here until she curls the unmistakably soft hairs of the blanket draped over her between her fingers.  

“You really want me to thank you for _rescuing me_ , Bill?” Dipper’s voice echoes into the bedroom from the living room.  “You were the entire reason I was _abducted!”_

“Maybe if you hadn’t LEFT!  Maybe if we had TALKED IT OUT like two single lifespan, three dimensional ADULT HUMANS, you wouldn’t have been so VULNERABLE!” Bill counters, his already loud voice getting even more raucous to the point that Mabel feels rattled by it a room over.  

“Sorry, which one of us let our three-dimensional human body catch on _fire_?” Dipper screams back, matching Bill tone-for-tone.  “You were the one who left me to negotiate with a demon high on blood lust!”

“Yeah, I FUCKED UP!  Believe it or not it happens every once in awhile!  You didn’t give me a CHANCE!”  Bill’s voice is taking on that slowed-down lilt like a turntable with a broken belt.  

“I have given you _so many_ chances, Bill, Jesus!”

“What, when you were TWELVE?  Do you know how many THOUSANDS OF YEARS YOUR-TIME have passed for me since then?  I’m like a BRAND NEW DEMON, because what can I SAY, you’re the BALL AND CHAIN that WORE ME DOWN, PINE TREE,” Bill replies with a tone that rumbles like thunder.

“Well, _gee,_ I sure am glad I _dragged you down to my level_ ,” Dipper spits back.  

“You--FINE, YES, YOUR LEVEL.  And I came happily, Pine Tree!  Because YOU KNOW WHAT.  This is a VACATION for me.  Living LINEARLY in a SKIN SUIT pretending the INEVITABLE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE isn’t happening right now, even though I can feel it SUFFOCATING ME.  Trying to pretend this life is IMPORTANT, and what we have is greater than the END OF EXISTENCE--which, YOU KNOW WHAT, DIPPIN DOT?  ISN’T EVIL, AND IT ISN’T GOOD, IT’S INEVITABLE.  And you know why I can say that? Because I’m not an ANT on a ROCK in the middle of NOTHING trying to convince myself that ME, MYSELF, HUMAN BILL, is the BEGINNING AND END OF IT.  Demon Me?  SURE THING, I’LL BE THERE.  But my time, right now, with you?  Kid, that’s gone in a WINK, and I’m just trying to enjoy the WEEK OFF that is your puny lifespan.  Christ, kid, can you believe I was gonna ask you to MARRY ME? Trying to ignore that soon enough, I’ll wake up in a void, and you’ll have been dead for a thousand years!”

It’s followed by a heavy silence, except Mabel can hear them both breathing deep even through the walls.  

“Wow,” Dipper finally chokes out a little softer, “I--I didn’t realize it was so, uh.  So difficult for you.  You know what?  If the whole human experience is really such a burden, maybe it’s time to give it up and move on.  Let me go wake up Mabel, and--and we can get out of here.  Keep whatever you want.  Turn this place into a black hole, or burn it into the ground, or whatever the fuck you want, Bill, I don’t give a shit.”

“Pine Tree--”

Mabel quickly lays back down and pretends she hasn’t been listening when she hears Dipper’s lumbering footsteps come down the hall toward her.  With her eyes closed she can still hear him open the door, slow and measured, like he’s trying to hide his anger, like he didn’t just wake up the entire building yelling at Bill.  She feels him sit down at her knees, and waits for his hand, but it doesn’t come for almost a minute.  He just sits there, breath hitched and hiccupy, trying to compose himself.  

Finally, he shakes her gently.  “Hey,” he whispers.  “Hey, it’s time to go.”

“Go?” She repeats, trying to sound sleepy and naive.  It isn’t hard, what, with feeling like she might cry at any second.  “But ‘m comfy, Dipper.”

“Yeah, uh,” he says.  “That’s why we gotta get you back to your own bed.”

“What about,” she tries, but the tears are welling up in her eyes.  She pushes her face into the pillow and hopes he doesn’t see.  “What about you?”

“Me?” Dipper echos.  “Well, I--maybe I need to start paying you rent, I guess.”

“Dipper,” she says, and she _is_ tired, but not sleepy-tired; she’s exhausted, she’s the kind of tired you get when you watch someone hurt and you hurt with them until it completely drains you.  

“Mabel?” He says, and she’s shaking with tears.  

“He loves you so much!” She finally blurts out, full body sobbing with it.  “Why are you being so _stupid_ about this, Dipper?  Why won’t you just let him _love you_?  You clearly give a fuck about him too, but you’re so _stubborn_!”

She wipes at the snot that’s coming out of her nose with the tears that that are rolling down her cheeks without abandon.  Her entire face feels hot, and with anyone else she would feel embarrassed by how quick she is to emotion even as a grown ass woman.  

“Mabel, he’s-- You saw how out of control he was!  Back there,” Dipper says weakly.

“I saw more than you! Jesus, Dipper, you were stoned out of your eyeballs!  I haven’t seen you that high since ever!  Not even that one time Grunkle Stan tricked you into eating half a batch of weed brownies, and, and, and you were comatose for three days!”

“Whoa--”

“--Do you even know where he gets his power from?  The power you’re so _afraid of_?”

He shakes his head slowly, and she takes the opportunity to push herself up on an elbow and grab a fist full of his hair.  

“From the _hair you gave him,_ dumbass!  That he keeps with him at all times!  That represents the most permanent thing he has on this planet, in this form, which is _you_ ,” she says, tugging down on him to emphasize every other word.  

“You really believe that?” He asks, and she rolls her eyes and rubs her nose with the back of her hand again, sniffling.

“Of course I do!  I just watched him save you from a group of men who abducted you!  Dipper!” She says, finally letting go of his scalp and pushing him away. “I just spent three weeks experiencing his phases of grief!  I showered in blood and woke up to frogs in my dresser and have too many weird, synthetic alien dicks sitting in a cardboard box in my living room for me to not believe him!  He loves you!  He has people feelings for you!  You’re his biggest strength and his greatest weakness, dummy!  Why won’t you admit that?”

Dipper is quiet.

“It’s one thing if you don’t want it,” she says, softer.  “But if you do--why punish yourself?

“I’m afraid,” he says, eventually.  “And maybe I--maybe I don’t like being a day in his calendar year, you know?  Maybe I don’t like the idea that this person I love is gonna go on forever, it just-- it’s not fair.”

“Well, nothing’s fair, bro-bro,” Mabel replies, scooting herself up so they can sit side-by-side on the bed.  The sun is going down outside, and the entire room is lit in an eerie, hazy violet.  “You deal with what you can, and for everything else?  There’s marriage counseling, I guess.”

It startles a laugh out of Dipper.  

“God, marriage.  Right.”  He rubs at his temples.  “Alright, well, find me the closest demon-human specialist, and maybe we can make something work.”

She rolls her eyes again, which are now red and puffy and sting when she rubs at them with the heel of her palm.  “Like they don’t exist.  You should know by now that there are probably plenty of functional demon-human relationships, and a service that suits them.  You probably just have to move somewhere like Portland to get the good ones.  You know, some place big and weird.”

He laughs again--weakly, but still a laugh.  “God, you’re probably right.”

“Of course I’m right,” she tells him, leaning her head on his shoulder.  “I’m always right.”

“God,” he says again after another bout of silence.  “So, smarty pants, what do I do now?”

“What do you want to do?”  She asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m afraid.”

“Oh, _come on_ , Dipper, since when has being afraid ever stopped you from doing anything?” She says.  “You used to love danger!  It’s--think of it as another adventure.”

He nods to himself.  “Yeah,” he says, even if it is weak.  “Yeah, okay.”

“Please?” She continues.  She’s smiling now.  “Come on, I need you guys to patch things up so I can have my couch back.  I haven’t gotten laid in almost a month!”

“Ew, Mabel!” He grimaces. “You do it on the couch?”

“Dipper,” she says in a dangerously low voice, turning his head so they face each other, “I do it _everywhere_.”

x

Dipper says the proposal went like this:

They made up, first, obviously.  Things didn’t go back to normal right away, and Dipper spent a few more nights on Mabel’s couch, even if he did bring his sleeping bag with him the second time around so he wasn’t sleeping _directly_ on the couch.  

But true love endured, and Bill went back to his support group; he got a new one day sober chip for his power trips, even if he did have a fresh ziplock of Dipper’s hair in his back pocket.  And Dipper managed to lie to an entire academic committee about some health issue that kept him from going to class for a month, probably with Bill feeding him well-spun lies in his ear the entire time.  Bill went back to his hobbies, like buying unnecessary furniture from Jonathan Adler and cursed objects on the black market to accessorize their apartment.  

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, I saw the creepy painting and the ottoman,” Mabel cut him off, grabbing his left hand, “tell me about the _ring_.”

“Fine!” Dipper said, trying to tug his hand away.

It was closing in on Halloween, so they went to get pumpkins.  Bill took him to a place with a haunted corn maze, and when they pulled into the parking lot, Dipper realized it was on the same lot where the minotaur’s labyrinth had stood so many years ago where they had initially reconnected.  

 _You think you can SURVIVE another round with me in there, Pine Tree?_ Bill had asked, hand in Dipper’s back pocket, confident and unafraid.  Dipper didn’t say he thought at that moment he could survive anything with Bill, though he was sure Bill heard it somehow.  

Instead he said, _See if you can outrun a minotaur with human legs this time,_ and Bill pulled his hand away to elbow Dipper in the side.  

It was in the heart of the maze, where Dipper had freed Bill, where they had solved a time paradox so many years ago, that Bill had said, _Hey, Dipperoni._

And Dipper had said, _What’s that, Bill-abong._

And Bill had said, _How do you feel about making one last deal with me?_

And Dipper had turned around to see Bill looking almost clumsy with a jewelry box in his hand open, a silver band inside with a tiny yellow diamond, and he knew.  And Bill looked up into his eyes and said, _I’ll give you this ring if you promise you’ll spend the rest of your life with me_.

And Dipper said, _I think I can be amenable to that deal, yeah._

And Bill had said, _Well, how ‘bout we SHAKE on it, PAL._

And Dipper held out his hand.

  


 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic would never have been written without my flame, my muse [Kous](http://kouskousx.tumblr.com/) to cheerlead me every sentence of the way and be the Bill voice I needed in my life. come kinkshame me [@dadvans](http://dadvans.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!


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